But this blog post represents the definitive blow-by-blow, course-by-course run-down of our meal. I'll be adding/fine-tuning the dish descriptions a bit more over the next few days, but here we go…

Please realize, this is not a definitive account of Noma Japan. That's because chef René Redzepi is already changing and adapting, evolving and swapping in new dishes.

I find that even a week later, I'm still thinking – still dreaming – of that exeptional banquet. For those unable to make it over here, please enjoy vicariously!

You can’t help but be wowed by that setting. From the 37th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, you look out toward the distant hills and the unmistakable snow-capped, sunset-silhouetted cone of Mt. Fuji. It is hard to think of a more auspicious backdrop as you settle in for the three-hour, 16-course banquet.

That view is immediately forgotten, though, as soon as the floor staff start serving the food…

Course 1: The magic kicks in from the very first dish, jumbo shrimp served atop a platter of ice. They are superb, premium sashimi quality and so fresh they’re still dancing their final quivers.

But it is the seasoning – "flavors of the Nagano forest" the menu calls it – that defines this dish. A dozen tiny wild black ants are carefully arranged on the shrimp, their little pinpricks of sharp acidity acting as a perfect accent for the sweet, pink flesh.

Shima-ebi wth flavours of Nagano forest

"None of the other courses are as provocative, although ants are used so routinely at Noma, their presence should come as no surprise…"

Although the shrimp served on the day we were there were shima-ebi – a brace of them each – other varieties are also being used, depending on whatever is available on the day.

Course 3: Monkfish liver that has been smoked, frozen and shaved onto crisp bread – from baguettes baked by the folks at Sucre Coeur in Osaka. You've never seen an-kimo like this before: outrageously good.

Shaved monkfish liver

We didn't get the wine pairing, but by this time we were ready for a glass or two. Starting with this one…

Course 4: Cuttlefish "noodles" in the style of zaru soba. Served chilled – "We just can't do that in Europe", says René, "people demand their food hot!" – they came with an iced broth of rose petals from Ishigaki (Okinawa).

Koika cuttlefish "Soba", with rose petal dip

Course 5: Clam pie. Premium shijimi (freshwater clams) shucked individually by hand and painstakingly arranged on a tart crust infused with kombu seaweed and seasoned with a sharply, deeply acidic paste derived from wild kiwi fruit (one of the chefs also mentioned grated wasabi in this, but it wasn't there for us).

Unbelievably intricate work... René told us that there are 45 to 50 of the clams per portion. And it takes 6-8 chefs over 4 hours to shuck and clean 7 kgs of the suckers, starting early in the morning. "We only do it because we think it's worth it" he told us...

Fresh water clam and wild kiwi

Course 6: Even René's take on tofu is a revelation. Freshly ground from organic beans, the soy milk is set with a special coagulant, steamed for 20 minutes and topped with dainty white morsels of walnut collected last fall from wild trees. There was a layer of miso and parsley sauce at the very bottom.

Tofu, just steamed with wild walnuts

Tofu will always taste like tofu. But this is some of the sweetest in all Japan.

Time for some sake: This was an amazing unfiltered, naturally feremented brew from Terada Honke, in Chiba.

Course 7: At this point sous-chef Thomas Frebel comes out and tells us he has a dish for us that they're still working on. No complaints whatsoever about being guineapigs for this experiment – especially since it involves uni (sea urchin)...

Sea urchin, maitake and cabbage

Inside the cabbage leaf, a generous serving of Hokkaido bafun uni, seasoned with a rich sauce made from maitake mushrooms and miso. Superb. A great contrast of textures, even if the central spine of the cabbage was a bit too fibrous.

Course 8: Probably the least spectacular of the dishes to look at (and the hardest to get a good image of). But it was undoubtedly one of the highlights.

Scallops dried for two days are made into a thick fudge, with beeswax "and a little bit of butter" (as served in CPH). But the Japan version gets an exta treatment: it gets aerated into a light, spongey texture. Underneath this there were crunchy little beech nuts (foraged in the autumn) and kombu seaweed oil, this one darker and richer than the kombu oil served with the citrus earlier. What a dish. This one blew us all away!

Scallop dried for two days, beech nuts and kelp

Course 9: Slivers of Hokkori pumpkin, a delectable variety of winter squash that was simmered with kelp and arranged on the plate with fronds of kombu seaweed and salted-dried cherry blossoms. This was served with a milky koji-based sauce accented with cherry tree wood oil. Definitely one of the prettiest of all the dishes. And one of the tastiest.

Hokkori pumpkin, cherry wood oil and salted cherry blossoms

Course 10: Then another jaw-dropper. Mysteriously beautiful, metallic shiny black leaves, which René just described to us as "origami garlic flowers". Of all the dishes, this was the one that brought it home just how much work had gone into this meal.

Garlic flower

They were made from black (fermented) garlic, were flecked with salt, and had a texture somewhere between liquorice and fruit leather. We just picked them up and nibbled… and nibbled… trying to pin down the flavour. It wasn't "garlicky" at all, but it did have hints of that rich allium sweetness you get when you cook down garlic low and slow. Intriguing. And so good!

Technically this was one of the best courses. In practice, it turned out to be a bit too substantial, sapping our appetite ahead of the main course. But each of these starchy corms added a bit too much heft to the meal, at a stage where we were just about to embark on the "main" dish. Nice gari-style ginger pickles with them, though, to perk up the palate.

Roots and starches with ginger

Sake part 2: Inemankai, from the community of Ine on the Tango Peninsula in northern Kyoto Prefecture. Sweetish, but with a nice clear acidity too. And a beautiful reddish tinge that comes from the akamai (red rice) they use to ferment it.

Course 12: Wild duck, caught by the traditional way, in nets. Then hung and dry-aged for three weeks, roasted and served whole – though already carved. Superb!

Course 13: Turnip. "Cooked in yeast" was the initial explanation. But it went a lot deeper than that, involving the mycellium of cultivated shiitake. And a beautiful green broth made with parsley.

Yeast and turnip cooked in shiitake

Course 14: Rice and sake lees. The first of the dessert courses was also a standout. Crisp rice starch wafers, on a gelato of sake-kasu (lees), on a base of cooked mochi rice (sweet rice) – with a sauce prepared from foraged wood sorrel (oxalis), which is one of the wild herbs that were from the start a signature of Noma in CPH.

It was served with a beautiful green dip, also from the wild kiwis (but sweeter and less acidic than the paste with the clam pie).

Course 16: The very final offering was a treat to the eyes as well as the taste buds. Fermented mushrooms, enrobed in chocolate. Served with little twigs of wild cinnamon to chew on with our Tim Wendelboe coffee. Minds and palates well and truly blown.

Wild cinnamon and fermented mushroom

This is more than a labour of love by René and his team. It's an insane, madcap project that is really pushing the envelope on what can be done with Japanese ingredients – and what the Noma team can achieve.

We were there on Day Three, and the effort and intensity that has gone into the project was clear on René's face as he worked alongside the wait staff, bringing us dishes, explaining the ingredients and the processes.

As I wrote in my review:

"Less than two weeks in and the menu is already evolving, as Redzepi adjusts and swaps in new dishes. By the time Noma Japan comes to a close (on Feb. 14), everything is likely to be even more finely honed.

"Even after that, the ripples from this bold, imaginative experiment will continue to spread. Redzepi sees this as a step to take Noma in Copenhagen to the next level. Meanwhile, here in Japan, a generation of chefs and customers have had their eyes and palates opened wide, beyond the confines of Japanese tradition.

"A magnificent success."

Team Noma hard at work…

… and then breathing out at the end of service: Head chef Daniel Giusti (right) and sous chef Junichi Takahashi. Great job guys!

And this was our menu:

PS: For another take on Noma Japan in a very different style, check out this fantastic review in emoji by Tejal Rao, who is the restaurant critic for Bloomberg.

This is the hotate-ten: a single sashimi-quality scallop lightly cooked whole and sliced into two: the interior is still firm and rare, the outside tender and white, encased in a thin light layer of batter... It comes with a selection of vegetables. Highly recommended.

But so is the gobo-ten — burdock cut into chunky strips with plenty of fibrous texture. Just sprinkle with a little of the sea salt. This one is intended to go with sake, rather than soba.

And then there are the seasonal specials. Currently it's shirako (milt) of fugu pufferfish. But soon there will be spring sansai wild herbs and takenoko bamboo shoots to look forward to.

Don't get the wrong idea: the soba is certainly not an afterthought. It's just that you don't order it until you're done with your nibbling and sipping. Narutomi-san prepares it from scratch, grinding and sifting the grain, then making the dough, rolling it out and cutting it into delicate noodles.

Most people go for the cold seiro soba, served with a dip on the side — with a few shreds of fine-sliced negi and a dab of wasabi the only extra seasoning. It's all you need, though: this is soba with plenty of buckwheat flavour.

Narutomi-san is is just as happy to serve hot kake soba — in a rich, warming broth. Needless to say he is as perfectionist about this as everything else on the menu. He's even printed up a little information card* placed on the table, in which he explains the absolute optimum temperature for kake-soba. Which is 85-86 degrees C.

If after this you're still a bit hungry, put in an order for some soba-gaki. Narutomi-san whips up his gaki nice and light, smooth and creamy, topped with a cone of fresh grated wasabi. Delicate. Subtle. Earthy. Piquant. Deep.

And finally a jug of soba-yu, thick and milky-white, so good: there's no better way to round off the meal.

And, because the address, phone number and website are currently missing from the Japan Times online version of my column, here are the details:

* Narutomi-san has not been a soba artisan all his life; in fact, for two decades he worked in publishing, which may account for his sense of design — not just the restaurant but also his web site — and the informative leaflets he displays on the tables.

02/15/2013

Certainly you can drop into Te-uchi Soba Narutomi for a quick meal of the excellent ju-wari (100 percent buckwheat) noodles. And pair it with the delicate tempura too.

But there's a great selection of sake and side dishes too, which may tempt you to linger a bit longer. Starting with the yakimiso...

Narutomi-san blends two kinds of miso ― a light-colored koji miso and a richer rice miso ― with grains of buckwheat, giving it extra crunch, texture and nutty flavour. He spreads this mix over a dark ceramic saucer that is slightly concave, then grills it until it's lightly browned and starting to crisp around the rim. Impossible to stop nibbling on.

And so is the uni tsukudani. It's really good with beer. It goes even better with sake.

It's made by lightly salting and drying the urchin until the texture is nice and firm, perfect as a sake snack. Or beer.

The anago nikogori (eel in its own aspic gel) is definitely worth trying: light and delicate but with plenty of umami savour.

On a cold evening, the yu-dofu ankake is just the ticket. The scoops of tofu are first heated up in dashi, then thickened with kuzu starch and served with a generous blob of grated ginger.

The kamo-nuki is another cold-weather favourite. Think of it as kamo-nanban soba, without the soba ― and with the addition of those oblong slices of golden-yellow awa-fu gluten dumpling. There's some nice yuzu perfume coming up out of that steaming bowl.

Dashi-maki tamago is another traditional sobaya standard. Here it comes in a substantial portion big enought to share between two (or more). Narutomi-san says it doesn't fluff up enough if he makes it with any less than four eggs.

It's also curiously under-seasoned. But it does come with shoyu on the side, which you drizzle onto that mound of grated daikon.

One small thing that gives Narutomi an edge is the tableware, which is mostly pottery, though also some glass or lacquer.

The beer is served in ceramic tumblers. And you get to choose what choko you want to drink your sake out of. A nice touch.

I will put up another post shortly with more about Narutomi-san and his soba. For the moment, here is some more (in Japanese) about that excellent and highly unusual uni tsukudani...

And because the address, phone number and website are currently missing from the Japan Times online version of my column, here are the details:

10/25/2012

Last weekend, Daniel Cox cooked dinner for me — well, me and a dozen or so other lucky souls who found their way to the obscure venue in Yokohama where he served three nigh-on-impromtu pop-up feasts.

For those out of the UK gastronomic loop, Dan is the man in charge at Aulis in Cumbria (northern England), which is the research kitchen for L'Enclume, the Michelin two-star, 10/10 restaurant by Simon Rogan. Besides developing the menu, running the restaurant farm and going out foraging, Dan also serves exclusive multi-course chef's table meals at Aulis. That's the kind of dinner we had the other day.

Dan was brought over to Japan for a week by Tom and Emi of Libushi — more at their website here — who are based up in Nozawa Onsen, in Nagano Prefecture, where they have a farm. It was a massive opportunity for those of us who can't nip up to Cumbria on a whim, or even to Roganic, the much-lauded limited-edition (two years only) restaurant Rogan set up in London.

Here are a few images from the other evening, with simple descriptions of the dishes. Dan did describe the ingredients and preparations in considerable detail, but you'd have to ask him yourself about the finer points involved...

The venue was a discreet little second-floor cafe space in Yoshidamachi, a grungy but now gentrifying (with plenty of good things happpening) district just to the north of Kannai Station in Yokohama.

One long, large table; just over a dozen people sitting on one side; the kitchen space on the other. The pots of herbs and shoots set into the table were grown on the Libushi farm in Nozawa, and most of the produce used in the dinner came from them too.

We sat back and watched as Dan prepared the food, with the help of his sous-chef for the evening, Kensaku Katagiri — a.k.a. Ken-san — from Nozawa Onsen, where he works in the kitchen of his family's hotel.

Dan introduced each course, while Emi translated into Japanese, also adding a bit of extra context where necessary.

1. First up as an appetizer: Pig and Eel — croquettes of Beniton breed pork (raised in Iida, also in Nagano Pref.) with unagi eel. These were combined and cooked as croquettes, with a crispy deep-fried coating made with potato starch set with tapioca to make it fluff up beautifully. A great starter and an excellent way to kick off the meal.

Here it is, broken open...

And this is what we drank with it: Ryugan, a grape related to Koshu, from Colline de Sanctuaire, Nagano.

2. Next, another brilliant dish: red shrimp on thin home-made crackers, topped with a wicked sauce of mitsuba and English parsley (but grown in Nozawa). A beautiful – and delectable – symbolism: the coming together of the two countries at this event. You can just make out the layer of soft "cheese" that Dan made himself a day or so ahead of the event.

Third course: Hokkaido oyster poached in its shell in ichiban dashi — made with Nozawa spring water and prepared the way Dan learned from umami-master Yoshihiro Murata of Kikunoi. Because it was cooked at a low temperature, it retained its shape perfectly.

Served on a bed of celery and nama-wakame seaweed (from Kagawa Pref.), it was garnished with oka-hijiki and fennel frond, and served in a lacquered bowl intended for miso-shiru (no actual miso in it; that would come later on).

And this is what we were drinking with it: a nifty junmaishu sake (from Nagano of course) called Michelle, after the Beatles ditty.

Next up: Carpaccio of akami tuna, seasoned with an amazing, aromatic charcoal-smoke oil that Dan prepared from the white ash of premium binchotan charcoal. This was served on a yogurt sauce with fine slivers of kabu turnip, garnished with kaiware daikon spouts and sprinkled with a mix of roasted seeds.

So good it deserves a close-up... Nice lacquerware too!

We were served a different sake with this one: Mizuo Hatsuyuki-no-mai (meaning: "dance of the first snow") hiya-oroshi brewed in Nagano. Apparently, the water used by Mizuo to brew its sake is the same Nozawa spring water that is used in all the dishes Dan prepared at this dinner. It's also the same spring that Tom and Emi use for watering their vegetables, herbs and shoots.

Course 5 was also very Japanese in inspiration and presentation...

A couple of days previously, Dan said, he'd been out in the forests of Nagano with a professional forager and eventually they came across a huge carpet of nameko, maitake, shimeji and other fungi — more wild mushrooms in one place than he'd ever seen before.

He served the nameko together with scallops that had been lightly smoked (in cherry wood), bathed in a stock prepared from the wild mushrooms in a torigara (chicken wings) base. The garnish was slivers of Nozawa-grown green shiso leaf, and finely grated British hazel nuts.

Course 6: Hirame (flounder) poached in dashi; kabocha puree; baby-leaf nozawana greens; a sauce made from onion, celery and fennel, with some miso in it as well as clam dashi.

The garnish for this was shaved crisp-fried chestnuts, foraged from the Nozawa woods. Lovely.

And this is what we drank with it: a very tasty Chardonnay from the St.Cousair winery [in... yes, you guessed, Nagano]

7. The meat course: Wagyu beef — the cut known as zabuton — from cattle raised (also in Nagano Pref.) on a diet of apples, which gives a wonderful sweet aroma to their meat. After long cooking at low temperature, it was seared over the teppan, then sliced and served with a splash of fragrant egoma (shiso) oil.

Dan served it with wedges of beet and red frill mustard leaf, a puree made from apple cider, and a sauce fragrant with the umami of miso (white and hatcho) and sake [and yes, my notes are getting sketchier by the course here!].

The drink paired with this one was cider [unfortunately no photo for this, but it was a stonker].

And finally dessert: freshly made soft sorbet made from the locally-pressed juice of mikan mandarins, which was accompanied by a crisp sponge honeycomb; a puree of sweet potato (grown by Tom and Emi); garnished with a sprig of shungiku (chrysanthemum greens) and sprinkled with a few yellow chrysanthemum petals.

We also had some of that same mikan juice to drink along with dessert. Produced for Ken-san's hotel, it tasted almost as thick and rich as a mango smoothie. No wonder it's called "Superlativ"!

And that, basically, was it. What a great meal! We staggered off into the night, just in time for our last train. At least we didn't have to get back from Cumbria...

Thanks again, Dan! And to Tom and Emi: great job!

PS: And if you go over to the Libushi site, they've now posted a very cool video taken at this event, showing the tuna dish being plated.

02/21/2011

Or perhaps I should say: the rest of the pictures. There are plenty of other photos that didn't make it into my Friday Japan Times column. It's a visual place, not by dint of the decor but the opposite: It's sparse and simple but there's always plenty going on in the kitchen. Plus there's plenty of colour on the plates.

The entrance is suitably inscrutable: A flight of wood-clad stairs leading down to an unmarked door in the basement of an unremarkable building on the side of a busy highway on the outskirts of Shibuya... A vestibule of polished wood gives onto a spacious dining room so simple and spare in design it feels almost unfinished.

Just about the only decoration is this sign on the wall with the kanji characters for "Shokkan". What's it mean? "Shoku" means "food/eat"; and "kan" is taken from the name of owner-chef Sato Kan.

The first thing you will be brought will be a plate of crudités — a colorful selection of sliced vegetables — together with an attractive red dip made by blending tomato with miso. It's a surprising combination, savory with a hint of sweetness, but one that works well. Indeed, this has become one of Shokkan's signature dishes, and you can buy pots of this tomato miso to take home with you.

The selection of vegetables was as intriguing as it was colorful: A wedge of pink aka-kabu turnip; baby cucumber; slivers of yellow bell pepper and Chinese cabbage; what looked like celery but turned out to be from the stem of an ebi-imo (taro); and, most unusually, a slice of zasai, not the pickles served with Chinese cuisine but raw, grown locally, we were told, on the Miura Peninsula.

Our sashimi platter was as good as we'd anticipated when we'd ordered our sake.

We were kept happy and intrigued in equal parts by two dishes that followed: kinkan shira-ae, sliced kumquat oranges in a creamy tofu dressing...

...and smoked scallops, which arrived at the table along with appetizing smokehouse aromas and a dip of chopped-onion "mayo."

We were less impressed with the "grilled" negi leeks. They were in fact plunged into the deep-frying wok first before being seared, leaving them far too oily to enjoy with their mushroom-flavored miso dip.

Next time, we will instead order the bamboo shoots deep-fried a delicious golden-brown, which we saw going out to those who'd ordered the full course.

We could not leave without trying the other house special. Listed under the "Clay Pot Dishes" section of the menu, it is called Paella — though few in Spain would recognize it as such. Nonetheless, the combination of rice cooked with tiny dried sakura-ebi shrimp and topped with plenty of seafood — asari clams, small mussels and generous amounts of ikura salmon roe — was a winner.

Make no mistake: This is not kaiseki cuisine. In fact, it's closer in feel to an upmarket izakaya tavern than anything at the formal end of the spectrum. If you want to give it a name, call it contemporary kappo: reliable, entry-level Japanese cuisine presented with a handsome drizzle of style.

Ambiance, food, value for money. Shokkan ticks the boxes on just about all counts... It's got the look; the food is put together well; and there's no sticker shock at the end your meal. Best of all, it's a place you can take out-of-town guests — or even send them on their own — in full confidence they will feel they've discovered somewhere rather special.